On 14 Jun 2012, at 09:23, Chris Cowley wrote: > I have my favourite text editor and pasmo set up, which I use for occasional > speccy stuff, and > have augmented this with pyz80
I use the same mix of pyz80 and Pasmo for SAM and Speccy development, along with my favourite text editor. In both cases the editor launches the assembler, and if successful it opens the disk image in SimCoupe. Using autoexec (pyz80) and end (Pasmo) directives to auto-run the code makes for a very fast development cycle. JAM Assembler can do all of that for the SAM side in its own IDE, though I'm a sucker for my usual text editor, so I have to admit I've not used it very much. The assembler does support some extra features over pyz80 though, which may be useful. I also use Makefiles (or a make.bat on Windows) for managing any additional input dependencies, such as image conversion and table generation. Again, it's just so a single command does everything automatically. The only time I need to get my hands dirty is for proper releases, where I'll usually add a BASIC loader and keep data as separate files on the disk. > Have also got SAMdisk and DiskManager for manipulating disk images, which > seem to be working nicely, but... I generally only need SAMdisk when transferring disks to real hardware for testing. I still assemble on the PC, even when I can only run on real hardware (Trinity ethernet mostly). Copying the output DSK to a BDOS record on a Compact Flash card and moving that to the Atom Lite on my SAM takes seconds. For larger code listings, or if the launched program crashes and takes out the development system, it's usually faster. Even transferring DSK via floppy isn't too slow if you use the --minimal flag to only copy the used portions of the disk. It's been a while since I've used DiskManager, especially since pyz80 can add a samdos2 file to the start of the disk using the -I command-line option. SimCoupe will boot disks without it, but you still need it for cold booting on real hardware, so it's recommended to add one. I used to use DiskManager for importing images to SCREEN$ format, until... > What I really could do with is a utility (preferably with a palette > editor) for drawing graphics (tiles, sprites) that runs on Windows and > spits out either DEFBs or binary files that I can INCBIN. Does such a > thing exist? I mainly use Paint Shop Pro 7 for most SAM image editing, with a .pal file loaded containing the 128 SAM colours. I just draw sprites on a big image, keeping to a grid spacing, and making sure I stay within the 16-colour limit (there's a colour counting option). My development is usually split between Windows and Mac, and this is one area I've struggled to make equivalent. The image editors I'm using (Pixelmator and Acorn) don't support working directly with palettised images, and just convert them to RGB for editing. So I'm generally limited to making only small changes, and hoping I stay within the colour limit. > Failing that, something that has a reasonable stab at > converting PNGs or GIFs into a form I can use in asm would be useful. I've got a Perl script to extract graphics files from a palettised PNG image and save in raw SAM (or Spectrum) format, which can be included in the .asm using INCBIN. I think the Spectrum version of my png2bin.pl is in the pacemuzx project on GitHub, but the SAM version is likely missing as I was (and still am!) rewriting it. I wanted something script based with minimal dependencies, so I could use them on whatever OS I happened to be on. Si
